I have occasionally seen the class referred to simply as “Solfège.” This reveals a common misunderstanding:  solfège is just one of many tools used in musicianship training—not an end, but a means. We don’t offer the class with the goal of teaching solfège; we use solfége to teach musicianship. It seems the purpose of teaching these skills—musicianship—has been lost.  (More on solfège here.)

Musicianship is about training the student not just to be a player of an instrument, but to be a musician. The best way to do that is to take the instrument away.

So, we teach sight singing. Students are expected to be able to accurately perform melodies and rhythms at sight. One goal—the obvious one—is to master the skill of reading music, which can then applied on the instrument. But are we seeing the larger, but less obvious goal?  Learn to be musical without an instrument. The instrument is basically a machine. It only makes music if the player knows how to make music. As long as the player depends on the instrument to make music, it’s the tail wagging the dog.

“Musicianship is about training the student not just to be a player of an instrument, but to be a musician. The best way to do that is to take the instrument away.”

This is why, with true musicianship in mind, I rarely touch the piano in my classroom. Almost never. When students sing inaccurately, I correct them by singing accurately myself, showing them the mistake, which in some cases might be an error of intonation that cannot be demonstrated on the piano. When performing sight singing exercises, my students learn how to find any pitch they need relative to the pure “A” offered by a tuning fork. If a teacher sits at the piano, playing along with their students while they sing, they may learn what intervals and triads sound like, but unless they can do it without the crutch of an instrument to lean on, that’s poor musicianship. Musicianship means being able to do this without an instrument.

Similarly to sight singing, we require students to perform rhythm exercises. Again, there is an obvious goal of bringing them to proficiency in reading, but with rhythm, too, there is a larger, less obvious goal: to learn to feel the silent pulse and keep it consistent.  Sometimes there is silence in music. My beginning students have a very hard time with this. They can’t stand even a beat of silence and rush to the next sounding note. Musicianship means “hearing” the silence as well as the notes.

We talk about “ear training”, which is what happens when students learn to recognize and identify musical elements such as intervals and chords, but are we training them to use their “inner hearing”? If you ask a group of students to perform a melody, stop singing at a certain point, continuing the melody in their heads for a measure, will they be together, both rhythmically and tonally? That’s inner hearing, and that’s musicianship.

Training in dictation, which is the ability to write down melodies or rhythms as heard, also has a hidden but important benefit when it comes to musicianship. Typically, students are required to write down a melody or rhythm upon some fixed number of hearings. Now, at an advanced level, this is as it should be, but one has to ask what is the basic purpose of this in the first place? The ability to write down music upon hearing it has many practical applications, to be sure, but a larger purpose is served by practicing this in musicianship class.

The real skill that’s being developed here is musical memory. Not only is the student required to recognize intervals and rhythms, he or she is required to remember them for long enough to write them down coherently and legibly. Dictation is really a memory skill more than anything else, so at the beginning levels, dictation should take the form of memory exercises. It’s also an analytical skill.  Students should learn to recognize patterns and shapes early on, before being asked to write anything down. This is why, rather than having students just write as they’re hearing, I ask them not to even pick up their pencils until we have discussed the form and they can sing it back from memory. This is a stepping stone to becoming able to comprehend larger-scale forms. Musicianship means musical memory and an ear for form.

One day recently, my class was having trouble pulling together to sing a melody as a group. One of my students complained that it was much harder to sing with other people. You may have guessed that this was a student who had mastered the melody. By performing in a group in multiple, or even one part, even the strongest students are put to the test. Can they listen to each other and respond to each other’s strengths and weaknesses? Along with musical memory, sharp inner hearing and the ability to make music without an instrument, that’s musicianship.

(Warning: This post is intended for musicianship and theory nerds. If you are not in that category, your eyes will glaze over shortly.)

What are we arguing about?

The age-old argument is this: Do we teach students to sight sing using an absolute system (Fixed Do) or a relative one (Movable Do)?

Using the Fixed Do system, the syllable do corresponds directly to the note name “C”, such that Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti(Si)-Do is a C major scale. Re is D, So is G, etc. Teachers who use this system value pitch memory as a way of learning how to read.  Over time the student should learn from this what each note feels like and sounds like.

The Movable Do system emphasizes each note’s function in the given key.  In the major, Do is always scale degree 1, So is always scale degree 5, etc., no matter what the key. Here what’s important is knowing what each note’s role is in whatever key you’re in. People with perfect pitch have a hard time with this.

I won’t be coy about my own preference. In a classroom musicianship setting, the movable Movable Do system has the most pedagogical value. We have an excellent fixed system in the English language for expressing absolute pitches. It’s called “letter names”. The Fixed Do system is nothing other than what’s used in certain European countries as an equivalent to our letter names. Over time, using it may teach students by rote how to sing the notes, but it will not teach them intervals. It will not teach them anything about harmony or function, to say nothing of voice leading. There are times where musicianship and theory students need to be able to sing and identify specific notes, and in those cases our English-language letter names are at their disposal.

What about scale degree numbers?

Good question. Yes, scale degree numbers accomplish the teaching of intervals and function very well. Thumbs up on numbers. Up to a point. What happens when you’re working in a minor key? What happens when it goes chromatic?  Sing me a German augmented 6th chord, please, using numbers.  You can sing “6-1-2-4″, but that comes nowhere near expressing what’s happening in this chord.  At best you can sing “lowered 6 – 1 – raised 2 – raised 4″, but that is unreasonably clumsy.

What’s so great about Movable Do?

The value of the Movable Do system over Fixed Do and scale degree numbers is consistency. In Movable, the interval between do and mi is always a major third no matter what. The student can count on those syllables to mean only one thing. In Fixed, if we’re in C minor, then the interval between do and mi is a minor third.  The aural connection between those syllables and their interval is broken.  Again, the syllables here serve no purpose beyond that of our usual letter names. In Numbers we have the same problem. Depending whether you’re in a minor key or a major key, the meaning of “1-3″ can vary, so they run out of steam pretty early on in the training process.

It becomes clearer when you start talking about minor keys and chromatics.  There are diverging approaches regarding Movable Do and minor, but my particular flavor is the one that uses the syllable “la” as the first scale degree in minor keys.  So, that’s la-ti-do-re-mi-fa-so-la (natural minor).  I’m aware that some advocate sticking with do as the first scale degree in minor, but that just defeats all of the benefits described above.  Now, if la is the tonic, then we still have that consistency: do-mi is still a major third, although now it functions somewhat differently.

In Movable Do there’s a convention for dealing with chromatics.  Let’s get back to that German augmented 6th chord, where there’s a lowered 6,  a raised 4 and a raised 2.  We can sing the 6 as “lo” instead of “la“.  We can sing the raised 4 as “fi” instead of “fa“, and we can sing the raised 2 as “ri” instead of “re“.  Chromatic chords like this are born of moving voices.  This chord is by nature part of a process of “going somewhere” within a chord progression by altering some of the scale degrees.  Altering the syllables accordingly helps students absorb that.  It engenders a sense of voice leading, which makes it easier to hear and sing the odd intervals, such as the augmented 6th from the “lo” up to the “fi“, that come about as a result.

What could anyone possibly have against Movable Do?

That’s always been a mystery to me.  This post began as a response to the site referred to above, run by a  choral conductor who wants his chorus to learn their music more easily, (and who wants to promote the sale of his book), where I read some incoherent assertions regarding the disadvantages of Movable Do, to wit:

1. Does not develop a sense of relative pitch. “Do” is always changing as the key signature changes.
2. Accidentals (sharp, flats or naturals) must still be accommodated by “change.”
3. Modulations to new keys are not easily performed.
4. Harmonic and melodic minor scales as well as modes must also be accommodated by a “change.”

Regarding #1, well, yes “Do” is always changing, sometimes even when the key signature does not; that’s the point.  But a sense of relative pitch is exactly what it does develop.  Students learn to negotiate a descending tritone in context. Fa-ti.  Always a tritone.  They learn that the descending 4th, la-mi in context sounds and feels completely different than the descending 4th that is is do-so.  Or that tricky augmented 6th described in the German augmented 6th example above, lo-fi.

#2 and #4 don’t make any sense to me at all, so I’ll leave them un-rebutted.  They seem redundant to each other and to #1.

I think the key complaint is most clearly expressed in #3.  So, in other words: It’s harder.  The mistake being made here is to think that this would ever be a quick or easy process.  It is in fact a very slow-moving process whose purpose is to bring about deep understanding of the musical processes that drive the music we’re learning to sight read.  It is not meant to be a quick way to get your chorus to learn their material.  In fact, if the process of teaching this way takes any less than three years, you’re not doing it right.

Yes, you have to decide where the do change occurs, and there isn’t always one right answer, but with practice you become adept at analyzing music on the fly and you always know where you are within the big picture.

What about my perfect pitch?

It will help you when you’re singing letter names and hinder you when singing movable do.  I ask my students who have perfect pitch to please leave it at the door when they come in.  I’m sure it comes in handy at parties, but it certainly does not mean you don’t need ear training.  If anything it is an obstacle you need to learn how to deal with so you can learn how to focus on the tonal context of the notes you’re singing.

What about atonal music?

Fair question.  See above: “letter names”.  Actually I have no problem with Fixed do here, other than that it would be unnecessarily confusing for students who have had three years of Movable.  Once tonal sight singing is mastered, students need to learn to negotiate music one interval at a time without the tonal context, and letter names are fine for this.  I don’t buy the argument often made about “singability” of solfège syllables versus letter names.  It’s not a liederabend.  It’s musicianship class.

What have others written about this?

Reams and reams, I’m sure.  In addition to the site mentioned above there are a handful of other interesting discussions of this topic on the web.  I single out Jody Nagel’s article on this for being the most thorough (and neutral) explanation of all the methods and their advantages and disadvantages, plus his fascinating explanation of why this problem is unique to the English-speaking world.

Scott Spiegelberg’s blog Musical Perceptions has an interesting item on this topic.  An anonymous commenter offers what might be the only convincing argument for Fixed Do having to do with how a string player processes music while reading.  It is food for thought, but doesn’t quite apply to the classroom musicianship setting.

Do you disagree?

Please feel free to comment below, but please let’s all be nice.